Monday, November 9, 2009

A compilation of some of the non-druid-specific changes for 3.3 that may be of interest.

- Bags:The new Portable Hole is awesomeness, as a D&D player. 3k gold, sold by Paris Hilton in Lower City Shattrath.

- Leather:The market for Borean Leather plummeted when they changed up the mat requirements for the epic leg armor kits, and the market for arctic furs has been steadily rising past the level of sense as they're needed in bulk for any new leatherworking recipes in the 226-245 range, making it extremely difficult for leatherworkers in the 230-240 range to skill up... but, 3.3 is looking to make 10 heavy borean leather tradable for an arctic fur. While it won't be as easy to skill up as it did before they made the fur and orbs a requirement for the leg armor kits, it will be a bit easier than it is at present, given the relative rareness of arctic furs, and it will also give the heavy borean leather market a much-needed boost for skinners looking to make some gold from the pile of otherwise useless leather sitting in their banks from instances, which isn't even useful for skilling up leatherworking past around 230/235.

- New Leather Patterns:Legs and Boots this time around, for both the spirited casters and the furry ferals (those scaley druids of the fang need not apply). Combined with the chest and wrists from the 245 crafted-level teir, these new ones nicely round out the craftables, and those boots may very well be a required crafting for 10-man raiders depending on the Icecrown loot tables. They'll require Primordial Saronite to craft, akin to the Runed Orbs of yester-months. Moonkin will have to go to tailors, likely, to get craftables more suited to them.

- Mini-Pets:Between the Perky Pug dog from pugging in the x-realm lfg, 2 new pets from Breanni's store in Dalaran, and the Onyxian Whelpling WoW Anniversary pet, I'm wondering when they're going to release a 100-pets achievement?

- Gear Check:"As part of the matchmaking system, some of the more difficult dungeons will have a minimum gear requirement." I think this will fix a lot of the problems currently seen among pugs, where many players seem to only see gear checks in extremes: either a person is in top-end cutting edge gear, or they are useless. Often this belief excludes themselves and their own characters, leading many pugs (from my own experience) to be lead by a person who doesn't even meet the gear requirements they set for their raid, while setting the requirements very high in hopes of achieving a group that is really only reasonable within a guild rather than a pug.

What it boils down to is this: yes, people in greens shouldn't be going into ToC/Icecrown Citadel, and Blizzard wants to offer a more controlled gear-checker to prevent people in greens from applying to these instances, while at the same time they're semi-circumventing people from setting the "gear score" and what-not requirements too high. I have good reason to beleive that Blizzard is actually trying to keep people from going overboard with gear-ranking like many have been; a blue quote that made my day: "We actually talked today about adding an item level 300 shirt that did absolutely nothing but mess with mods that attempt to boil down players to gear scores." ...also, "there is, in my opinion, an unreasonable demand for player skill and gear requirements even for relatively easy content." I support and put my trust to Blizzard's gear-check in the pug LFG tool.

- Head and Shoulder Enchants:These are being made into heirloom items that, like the book of flight riding skill, can be mailed to alts. This will make rep-grinding Hodir on miscellaneous alts a non-requirement, especially with these BoA items being permitted to be mailed across faction; they do not have a faction requirement to use, just to purchase. Regardless, they've sped up the rep gains for Hodir and the base helm-enchant factions by 30%, so even if you do grind it out on your alts, it won't be as hard as before.

- Level 1 characters...no longer start with food or water in their inventory. I think all it was often good for was vendoring for some starting copper, since food tends to drop often enough off of lowbie mobs, though mana may be more of an issue :) Poor thirsty lowbies!

- Greed or DE? Since both of these rolls are weighed the same, I would suggest that enchanters who are grouped with classes that may wish to use an item for their main kit but aren't permitted to roll need due to class restrictions (ie Moonkin needing cloth spellhit gear, Heal-Pallies needing mail healy gear in lack of an appropriate shaman, etc), that the enchanters roll "greed" rather than "Disenchant." This will allow you to still DE the item at your own leisure, as well as giving you the opportunity to gift/sell/trade the item to the group member who does technically "need" the item but just couldn't roll more than greed.

For those that aren't enchanters, I think we'll see a new system come of this, where each member greeds an item and then trades it to the enchanter to DE for them, eliminating the need to roll for crystals at the end of the instance.

- Pets immune to tail sweep knockbacks!Given that the UI places these pets behind the target rather than to the sides where they would not get knocked back, I think this is fair.

- Limiting the "Meter Haxx":"Area-of-Effect Damage Caps: We’ve redesigned the way area damage is capped when hitting many targets. Instead of a hard cap on total damage done, the game now caps the total damage done at a value equal to the damage the spell would do if it hit 10 targets. In other words, if a spell does 1000 damage to each target, it would hit up to 10 targets for 1000 each, but with more than 10 targets, each target would take 1000 damage divided by the number of targets. 20 targets would be hit for 500 damage each in that example."

If you haven't gotten MANY WHELPS, HANDLE IT! yet, I suggest you do so before this patch ;)

- New Totem Art (for orcs and trolls):Yup. Still no new tree-druid or turkey art, but I'll now be able to tell the totems of my shaman guildies apart :)

- Emblems of Triumph...will be the new Standard: prepare to see more Tier 9.0 on alts.

- Hippogryphs:They can finally use their legs to walk/run like any normal mount, rather than hovering stubbornly a few inches off the ground flapping their wings. A very minor change, but one that has irked me mildly for a while now!

5 comments:

You touched on it tangentially, but the heirloom to other faction change is pretty cool. Might even be worth it's own point. :)

Re: Level 1, the regen rate is being upped significantly for characters levels 1-10, and spell cost is being dropped across the board up to level 80 I think. The idea is to make it so that starting casters never need to stop casting, which is probably a good idea. Right now, the only way to avoid downtime is to cast twice then stab with a dagger, which is completely counter-intuitive to how the classes play at later levels.

Re: Greed or DE?, remember, that the armour limitation is only for the Need-Before-Greed option (*not* Group Loot), so it really only affects cross-realm groups. Even still, I don't think you really avoid the issue with DEing in that case. What will more likely happen is Player A wants it but it's a different armor type so she rolls Greed, Player B doesn't care so he rolls for it to be DEed, Player C (Enchanter) rolls Greed. The issue is that if Player B wins the roll, he just gets the dust immediately. Really, I think the main thing to take from it is that if for some reason there is an off-armor piece that you want, just specifically make a same-server group to run it so you can use Group Loot as usual.

That is disappointing, in terms of those that need the gear but aren't allowed to roll need on it due to silly armor-type restrictions (I'm thinking of my feathered kin, here!). There are also leather spellpower pieces that would be worn by a shaman, at that! It seems so wasteful to automatically dust an item that would otherwise be tradeable.

I agree, but I imagine they just see it as a compromise to the cross-server aspect of it, since it's harder to enforce loot rules (unfortunately, the preferred "don't be a dick" loot rules aren't universal enough).

Heck, the leather pants from the heroic ToC 5-man are BiS for me right now, so I can definitely empathize. But like I said, if that's the case, there's nothing stopping people from forming a same server 5-man and using Group Loot with the current functionality.